


look to the past (future) with a smile

by navaan



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, POV Female Character, Sort of fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-04 05:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5322188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tegan meets Nyssa and loses her. But it’s not the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	look to the past (future) with a smile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



The first time she saw Nyssa, she smiled although none of what was going on around her was actually calling for a smile. 

Truth be told, she was scared. Upset. Confused. Even if there was no time for any of that, and things were just rushing along around her. To think that only this morning she’d been nervous about starting her job and missing flights. And now the world was turned upside down. The safe and known world pulled out from under her feet like a carpet of reality she could no longer stand on. Now there was an alien Police Box and Logopolis and the Doctor and Adric. But there was no time to stop and think about it, because everything was moving too fast.

And now there was that strange girl with the glossy, curly hair and the strange hippie or fairy princess get-up, looking young and serious and _friendly_ \- and Tegan felt she was back on familiar ground, finding her feet. A friendly smile answered with a friendly smile. 

That much was easy.

“I am Nyssa,” the girl said, introducing herself with serious clear eyes.

“I’m Tegan. So they hijacked you to!” She held out her hand politely and the girl cocked her head to the side as if she was unsure how to read the gesture.

“Is that how your people greet each other?” Nyssa asked as if she was filing the information away for later.

Tegan laughed. The rug was still not back beneath her feet then, not completely. But somehow it didn’t matter with everything else that had been going on. This was still simple.

They energetically shook hands and Tegan felt like she had found an ally in all this.

Of course things went downhill from there at first.

* * *

The Doctor regenerated and it should have been the final straw that drove her over the edge.

But Nyssa took it all as much in stride as could have been expected, and Tegan felt that as the older one - the one about to start a job that would involve calming hysteric passengers down and keeping calm in stormy weather - she needed to do the same. When all of this was over and she was home, then she could break down.

Nyssa smiled and just for that one moment she could forget how much of a turn her life had taken during the last day. 

She wasn’t alone. They were in this together. And they would do whatever necessary to save the Doctor.

* * *

The Doctor promised to take her home, but something always got in the way. Inexplicably - or perhaps the opposite - the Tardis seemed to have a mind of her own. So Tegan found herself stumbling from one adventure to another, from one alien planet to another, from past to future, home, but not home.

Nyssa helped her set up a room for herself, helped her navigate the corridors of the Tardis.

They stayed close. That first night when Tegan remembered her aunt and what happened to her, Nyssa took her hand and didn’t let go again. When Nyssa spoke of her home, of her family and faltered, Tegan impulsively hugged her. The Doctor swepped them all along, not giving them much time for downtrodden feelings and grief, and perhaps it was for the best. But it was good to have someone there who just understood without asking too many questions.

“It’s not all bad,” Nyssa said bravely, when they were standing on a beach looking out at the burning sea of Crak’soon.

The Doctor nodded proudly. “Right you are, Nyssa, right you are.”

For Tegan nothing about this situation looked like it had a good side to it. The sea was _burning_ ; a film of dangerous chemicals had spread and caught fire when a spaceship had crashed - with their direct involvement - saving the biggest city on the planet from being wiped out, but causing this impressive catastrophe. “What’s good about it?”

“The fire will burn out after some weeks, and I’m not saying it won’t be a problem. But it will end and the planet will recover. That’s what counts. People still have a home. And it’s a beautiful city. One day it will be a beautiful planet again. Nature will find a way.”

With a pang Tegan remembered that Nyssa really had no home to return to. She had been selfishly grieving, unhappy with her own situation, stuck away from home, but seeing things that other humans would never get to see.

Nyssa smiled again.

And this time with a heavy heart going light just for this moment Tegan smiled back and meant it; just like that first time.

* * *

She rushed off, fuming, stomping along the white pristine hallways that made up the labyrinthic innards of the Tardis towards her room, muttering: “Brave heart, Tegan! Have a little patience, Tegan. I’ll get you back home soon. But when? It’s all like a game of chance with him.”

The Tardis lurched and she braced herself against a wall after stumbling, then huffed, stopping for the moment, silently asking herself if this was her punishment. “Wherever we ended up now, I’m pretty sure it won’t be Earth.”

“Tegan?” Just two doors down the hallway a door had opened and Nyssa was poking her head out of the lab. “What is going on?”

“I suppose we’ve landed on another planet that isn’t Earth,” she said in her most scathing tone and sighed.

Nyssa’s face showed nothing but sympathy. And in a way that was all that Tegan was asking for: a little sympathy. But coming from Nyssa it actually made her feel a little… regretful. Nyssa had lost a father, a family, a home, a whole planet. How did Tegan’s situation even compare to that? “Don’t worry,” Nyssa told her. “The Doctor loves Earth. Sooner or later he is bound to get time and place right.”

That thought made her chuckle. It was so like Nyssa to see things in a more positive light.

* * *

After the Mara, Tegan couldn’t sleep. In fact she never even attempted to switch out the lights, nervous and tense and unwilling to invite the heightening of her senses she expected to come with darkness. She ended up sitting on her bed in her Tardis room, not sure what to do with herself. Even closing her eyes seemed scary.

A knock on the door made her nearly jump out of her own skin. “I brought you some cocoa,” Nyssa said as she angled through the door, two steaming mugs in her hand.. “I’ve come to like it a lot since you and the Doctor introduced me to it.”

It was such a homely, familiar, human gesture - so extraordinary and simple under the circumstances - that Tegan wanted to cry, but she felt herself relax a little instead. “Thank you, Nyssa. You really are the best.”

Nyssa stayed with her and Tegan allowed herself to fall asleep, listening to Nyssa talk about Traken, her childhood, science. She fell asleep, Nyssa’s arms wrapped around her shoulders, hiding her face against Nyssa’s side.

* * *

It wasn’t all good.

Adric’s death was the beginning of the end. 

Terminus broke her heart.

A part of her left behind with Nyssa - brave, brave Nyssa.

She would never forget her, the friendship they’d built - two women so different and yet made to be friends from the start.

“It wasn’t all bad,” she told the Doctor one day, after surviving Dalek’s and arguing with Turlough. Somewhere out there Nyssa was following her calling, making the world a better place, just like she’d made Tegan’s a better place. A brave scientist, risking her life to save others. 

She hoped she could be just a little like that.

* * *

She left the Tardis one final time and for a while she missed it, but she never dreamed of going back. Sometimes she had nightmares about the Master, about the Mara, about Adric and Cybermen and Daleks, but it only happened when she wasn’t feeling well. For the most part she felt like a stronger, better person, someone who had seen the dark side of the world, but also its wonders. There was no yearning for a more adventurous life, for going back. She thought of the Doctor and his Tardis often, but without regret.

She wasn’t grieving for any of her friends, but sometimes she asked herself what had become of Nyssa. Had she managed to find a cure for the plague? Had she perished on Terminus, because they had left her behind? Had she made a good life for herself in that dark place? 

The Doctor had always said that they might meet her again one day, but without a Tardis Tegan would never know.

Years went by and she never stopped wondering.

She went about her life, going out with friends, helping her mother with her garden, taking the car out for a drive and keeping her nephew out of trouble, going about her job with efficiency and her very own headstrong determination. 

She never stopped wondering.

Until one day she carried her groceries up the stairs and froze.

“Tegan!” The young woman called - older but still young, looking of an age with Tegan now.

“Nyssa!” she called and nearly let the bags fall right where she stood. “How is this even possible?”

There she was: Nyssa of Traken, wearing something appropriately strange for an alien scientist, all burgundy with silvery highlights and a matching hair piece. A metallic shape, smaller than her neighbor’s dog, with a cubic body and a ball shaped head was moving around her feet, making distractingly whirring sounds. “I have a Vortex Manipulator.” The declaration sent Tegan right back to the time on the Tardis when she’d had no idea what Nyssa and the Doctor were talking about half the time. Then Nyssa added more quietly: “I wanted to see you. Know you were alright.”

“You wanted to know _I_ was alright?” Tegan asked, nearly laughing, perhaps just with the tiniest hint of hysteria. “I’m home! You stayed on Terminus to cure a deadly disease!” 

“And I did,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone that reminded Tegan of the Doctor. She looked so healthy, so grown up and real, her Nyssa; solving unsolvable problems to make the universe a better place like it was nothing. “It took me seven years, but I found a cure. And then I travelled, trying to find a way back here.”

Time travel. The notion still made her head ache sometimes. “You weren’t looking for the Doctor, were you?”

“I was looking for you.”

Warmth welled up in Tegans chest and she admitted: “I always wondered what had become of you.”

In a show of why Nyssa had always been her favourite, she took one of the bags from Tegan and waited with a patient expression till Tegan had unlocked the door and invited her in. “I hope you have cocoa,” she said shyly. “I’ve not found anything like it yet anywhere else.”

Tegan, surprised at how this small gesture of unlikely normalcy made her heart well over, laughed.

Her life had never not been crazy, but perhaps she had missed to have a real life alien in her life to put things into perspective for her.

* * *

The little robot was called simply “Ten” and Nyssa revealed that he had been a gift by the Doctor. “He found me after I left Teminus and wanted to congratulate me.”

The chirping machine followed Tegan around her apartment like a trusty little pet. It looked completely lost and out of place in her kitchen, just like Nyssa, who looked at her expectantly as she prepared two cups of cocoa.

* * *

Nyssa stayed.

Tegan didn’t ask questions. She expected Nyssa to stay until she felt the pull to find a new problem for her brilliant brain to solve, something to better the world again. It never came up in conversation and Tegan felt it was better to just let it all unfold.

After a while she was afraid to get an answer. So she avoided even thinking the question.

One night she woke from a nightmare. The Mara, the Master, Adric, death and violence and so much fear. 

Arms were holding her close, making her feel safe. Nyssa had slipped into bed with her and was whispering soft words, telling her about a rare flower from Traken.

“I missed you, Nyssa,” Tegan whispered into the night, her voice still not much more than a breathy sigh.

“I missed you too, Tegan.” 

The lips pressing against her neck came as a surprise. But right then there was only one thing to do. She turned around and returned the embrace.

The dreams that came to her after were much more pleasant.

* * *

A message reached Nyssa via the little robot. Someone was requesting her medical expertise.

Someone, somewhere, far away from earth and god knows when.

Part of her had been waiting for this and so she was prepared now, keeping a brave and smiling face to not make it any harder on Nyssa than necessary. 

The next thing out of Nyssa’s mouth for some reason never occurred to her: “Come with me. Allott is a nice planet and I have my own lab, my own place there. Enough room for both of us.”

She’d been done with alien planets and travelling through space and time, but there was only really one answer. Flashes of her life played out before her life and she realized, that not travelling with the Doctor had been alright, but not being with Nyssa now would be unbearable. “What am _I_ going to do on Allott, Nyssa?” she asked and rolled her eyes.

“I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d appreciate some excotic Earth drinks.” The grin that accompanied the words was slightly mischievous.

Tegan sighed dramatically. “You just love me for the cocoa.”

“I do enjoy tea, occasionally,” Nyssa said smartly and grinned.

“Alright then, I’ll come,” Tegan agreed, sighing, but smiling.

It wasn’t like she needed persuading.

They had finally found each other again. She’d be damned if she’d let Nyssa slip away now.


End file.
